194 IN AFRICA 



always does sentinel duty for the others. His eyes 

 are so keen that he sees your hat when you appear 

 over the horizon two miles away, and from that mo- 

 ment he never loses sight of you. If you approach 

 too near he whistles shrilly, and every other animal 

 within several hundred yards is on the alert and 

 apprehensive. The kongoni often risks his own life 

 to warn other herds of animals of the approach of 

 danger, and if I were going to write an animal 

 story I'd use the kongoni as my hero. The hunters 

 hate him for the trouble he gives them, but a fair- 

 minded man can not help but recognize the heroic, 

 self-sacrificing qualities of the big, awkward, vigi- 

 lant antelope. Why these two sentinels had not 

 seen us is still and always will be a mystery, but it 

 is certain that they had not. 



At the same time we knew that any attempt to 

 approach nearer would alarm them and they in turn 

 would sound the shrill tocsin of warning to the un- 

 suspecting elephant herd, in which event we might 

 have to track the elephants for miles until they set- 

 tled down again. So we cautiously climbed down, 

 retreated below the edge of the hill, and worked our 

 way up in the lee of the group farthest to our left 

 in the expectation of finding the three bulls. From 

 tree to tree, and in the protection of large ant-hills, 

 we moved forward until we were less than fifty 

 yards from the elephants. Then we studied them 

 again, but could not locate the bulls. 



Probably at this time something may have oc- 

 curred to make the elephants nervous. Perhaps the 



